Announcements

We are pleased to announce that the winners of the 2018 Nutrients Young Investigator Awards are Dr. Rachel Murphy (School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada) Dr. Hannah Holscher (Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois, Urbana, USA).

For more information about Nutrients Awards, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/nutrients/awards.

We are delighted to announce that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is now a participant of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). Authors funded by the BMGF can enjoy discounts on the APC, while the funder covers the costs of eligible articles centrally. BMGF also has access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency.

We hope that funded authors find the programme beneficial and we are happy to offer our IOAP to other funders that need a streamlined workflow of compliance checking and APC coverage. 

To claim their discount, BMGF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript.

For any questions about the BMGF agreement, please contact the funder at support@chronos-oa.com or the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.

Recently, it was announced that a group of European funders supported 10 principles that will help to expand open access, known as Plan S. MDPI warmly welcomes this move as a step towards achieving more open and accessible communication of research across all disciplines. Some aspects remain to be clarified, however the details given so far match the aims and values that MDPI has held over the past two decades.

We believe that open access publishers should be active participants in discussions around Plan S, particularly regarding potential new business models and practical aspects of implementation. MDPI supports APCs as a transparent unit of payment for article publishing, however we are committed to exploring other measures and recently signed the Jussieu Call. Sustainability is a key value for MDPI, and future funding models should have at their heart the sustainability of knowledge and research dissemination. Plan S provides an opportunity for funders and publishers to directly discuss funding of open access journals in ways that are beneficial to all parties involved.

We are pleased to announce that starting from 1^st September 2018 the editorial leadership of Nutrients has been taken over by Professor Lluís Serra-Majem (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) and Professor Maria Luz Fernandez (University of Connecticut).

Maria-Luz Fernandez is Full Professor of Nutrition at the Department of Nutritional Sciences, University of Connecticut (USA) where she has been a faculty member since 1997. 

Dr. Fernandez’ research focuses on the effects of dietary strategies and drug treatment to prevent cardiovascular disease. She has employed different dietary regimes in her research, including the Mediterranean diet, carbohydrate restricted diets, inclusion of antioxidants from grapes, and more importantly she has established the lack of association between eggs and heart disease risk factors.  She has ongoing collaboration studies with reserch centers in Mexico to determine the effects of egg intake in diverse populations, including children and diabetic individuals; she has also conducted a study in the United Arab Emirates to evaluate risk factors for metabolic syndrome in this population. Dr. Fernandez was a member of the FDA Nutrition committee from 2010–2014.

Dr. Fernandez has authored 251 peer-review papers, 14 book chapters, and 235 scientific abstracts. She has been invited to present her work in the international arena including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Spain, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates. During her tenure at the University of Conneticut, Dr. Fernandez has graduated 34 PhD and 20 Master’s students from all over the world, who studied in the area of diet and heart disease and currently hold prominent positions in academia, industry and government agencies.

Lluís Serra-Majem is a medical doctor with a Ph.D. specializing in Preventive Medicine and Public Health Nutrition. In 1988, he became Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the School of Medicine of the University of Barcelona, where he founded and is the Director of the Community Nutrition Research Centre of the University of Barcelona Science Park. In 1995 he became Full Professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Senior Consultant at the Preventive Medicine Service at CHUIMI. He also holds the UNESCO Chair for Local Health Systems and Food Systems as well as serves as Director of the Biomedical and Health Research Institute (IUIBS), where he also leads the International Chair for Advanced Studies on Hydration and the program The Island in your Plate. He is colligated with the Spanish Ministry of Health’s Thematic Centre of Obesity and Nutrition Research (CIBER OBN group coordinator) and participates in the PREDIMED Study and Network.

In 1989 he founded the Spanish Society of Community Nutrition, of which he served as President from 2000 to 2006. He is President and founder of the NGO Nutrition without Borders, as well as of the Nutrition Research Foundation (FIN); he also served as President of the Mediterranean Diet Foundation (from 1995 to 2012) where he was leading the candidacy of the Mediterranean Diet as an Intangible Cultural Heritage by the UNESCO. He chairs the Spanish Academy of Nutrition and Food Sciences, and the International Foundation of Mediterranean Diet (IFMeD), and he is a visiting professor at several universities. He has published 75 books and 538 peer reviewed scientific papers with an impact factor over 2300 and an H-index of 56 (80 in Google Scholar). His main areas of research are public health nutrition, Mediterranean diet, obesity prevention and hydration. He was the President of the I and III World Congress of Public Health Nutrition.

They will work closely with over 100 Editorial Board Members from across the globe.

We are confident that under their leadership the journal will continue as a highly respected journal in the field.

We would like to take the opportunity to express our gratitude to the previous Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Jon Buckley, and the founding Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Peter Howe for their invaluable contributions to the journal.

We are happy to announce the establishment of an Open Access (OA) agreement with Qatar National Library (QNL). QNL is committed to supporting and helping Qatar authors publish OA at no cost. Through this national agreement, QNL will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by Qatar-based corresponding authors in MDPI journals.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with Qatar research centers and universities are prompted to choose QNL as part of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email and/or a computer registered with the institution’s IP range. QNL will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Qatar authors that have their APC covered by QNL are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "The publication of this article was funded by Qatar National Library".

For more information, please visit Open Access at QNL or email the QNL Open Access team at openaccess@qnl.qa.

We are pleased to inform that Nutrients received an updated Journal Impact Factor of 4.196 in the June 2018 release of the Journal Citation Reports®. The journal's 5-Year Impact Factor is 4.603. Nutrients now ranks 18/81 (Q1) in the category 'Nutrition & Dietetics.'

Overview of Citation Metrics:

• Journal Impact Factor, 2 yrs (2017): 4.196
• 5-Year Impact Factor (2017): 4.603
• CiteScore, 3 yrs (Scopus): 4.35
• SJR Scimago Journal Rank 2017 (SJR): 1.557
• Source Normalized Impact 2017 (SNIP): 1.403

 
Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Nutrients:

We are pleased to report Nutrients received a CiteScore of 4.35 for 2017. The metric reflects citation activity in 2017 in Scopus for papers published in the period 2014‒2016.

Nutrients ranks among the Top 10% of journals in the 'Nutrition and Dietetics' and 'Food Science' categories.

For the full details in the current CiteScore release, please see the journal's Source profile. To check the full list of MDPI journals receiving CiteScores, please see here.

The 2017 CiteScore™ data is available now, based on citation data in the Scopus® database. The current CiteScore reflects citation activity in 2017 for articles published in 2014‒2016. Please note that the list below includes journals assigned a CiteScore in this year’s release. For a full list of journals indexed in Scopus, please see our journal list.

Thirteen of our journals received a CiteScore which is in the top 10% of the distribution in at least one of the categories (marked with * in the table below), while a further 32 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

To access the full data for MDPI journals, please see here. More data can also be found in SJR Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

Unlike CiteScores and the widely used Journal Impact Factors, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) metrics are normalized in order to correct for differences in citation practices between scientific fields. Therefore, the SNIP allows direct comparison between journals specialized in different fields.

According to 2017 data, MDPI publishes six journals with an average citation impact, or SNIP, in excess of 1.500. These journals are Biomolecules, Cancers, Journal of Clinical Medicine (JCM), Marine Drugs, Remote Sensing and Sensors (see the last column in the table below).

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

We are pleased to announce the results of the first MDPI Writing Prize. We received a large number of entries from across the globe on the theme of “The Global Benefits of Open Research”. It was a pleasure to read so many original, well-researched and well-presented ideas, and the final choice was not an easy one. We are pleased to announce that the winners are as follows:

1st prize (500 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Edmond Sanganyado, Shantou University, China

2nd prizes (250 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Kamala T. Rajahgopal, Asia e University, Malaysia
Yin Zhixuan, Qingdao University of Technology, China

3rd prizes (100 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Alexandra Ticea, Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Romania
Ankur Sarker, University of Virginia, USA
Daniel Attoye, United Arab Emirates University, UAE

Congratulations to all of them! The winning entries can be downloaded by clicking on the names above. A compilation of all entries will soon be available as an open access book.

The writing prize is sponsored by the MDPI English editing service.